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Bitcoin Green Promises to Address Sustainability Issues in Blockchain

The immense amount of energy that Bitcoin mining requires is no secret, and questions about sustainability have been raised. With the Bitcoin network consuming more energy than 82 per cent of countries on earth, it is not surprising that alternatives like Bitcoin Green come to the forefront.

The Bitcoin Green team designed what they call The Green Protocol, and its mission is two-pronged:

To raise awareness for sustainability issues arising from the proof-of-work consensus commonly used in public blockchain networks

To provide an alternative to Bitcoin that is drastically faster, cheaper, and more scalable.

In a nutshell, The Green Protocol works as follows:

Proof-of-stake and masternode-only mining

Combination with fixed block reward

Creation of a fair distribution of coins.

It is modeled on the Satoshi’s original vision for Bitcoin, with efficiency and decentralization still at the center of everything.

The concept of Bitcoin Green is founded on using proof-of-stake instead of proof-of-work with masternodes to secure the network. Bitcoin, in its current form, uses the latter (SHA-256 proof-of-work consensus algorithm). Bitcoin Green’s founders state that this is the primary cause of Bitcoin’s downsides – high network fees, slow transaction times, massive energy consumption, frequent hard-forks that destroy network effect, etc. By using proof-of-stake, these limitations can be gotten rid of.